CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) - Police coerced movie theater gunman James Holmes into talking about explosives found in his apartment after he shot 12 people to death, and those statements should be barred from his murder trial, defense lawyers argued in a Colorado courtroom on Monday.
Prosecutors stood by the admissibility of the statements, countering that police were merely trying to obtain information on how to safely defuse the bombs to protect law enforcement officers and the public from a potential detonation of the booby traps.
The latest legal back-and-forth in the high-profile case came in a hearing over what evidence should be allowed in the capital murder trial of the onetime neuroscience graduate student, due to start in early February.
Holmes, 25, is charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder for opening fire in a suburban Denver cinema during a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in July 2012.
The shooting rampage left 12 moviegoers dead and 70 others injured or wounded, some with permanent paralysis.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyers have said their client was undergoing a psychotic episode when he sprayed the movie auditorium with gunfire before surrendering to police.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the California native if he is convicted.
Public defender Kristen Nelson said police denied Holmes' repeated requests to speak to a lawyer before he was questioned by investigators, and deceived him into thinking that the information he provided would not be used against him.
Had police allowed him to seek legal counsel immediately after his arrest, as required under the U.S. Constitution, a lawyer would have helped "protect this mentally ill man from being the instrument to his own conviction and execution," Nelson said.
Holmes, who has tended to stare straight ahead during courtroom testimony, bowed his head throughout Nelson's impassioned argument.
Prosecutor Rich Orman countered that police were unsure at the time if there was a second gunman at large and were dealing with a fluid situation.
"They could not know if setting foot in the apartment would trigger a massive conflagration," he said.
Defense lawyers also said the seizure of Holmes' bank accounts, which traced his firearms purchases, should be suppressed because there was not initially a valid, signed court order allowing the records to be released to prosecutors.
But prosecutors said they noticed what they called an oversight and informed the public defenders and the court of the error that was later rectified with a proper court order.
Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos Samour Jr. has not ruled on the suppression motions.
(Reporting by Keith Coffman; Editing by Steve Gorman and Eric Beech)
A business that moves its email to a hosted solution such as Office 365 typically hopes to reduce operating and administrative costs, reduce spam, and decrease downtime. Alas, administrators who open up the Web-based GUI for Office 365 discover that several of the commonly needed administration and reporting options for Exchange are not available. In many cases, administrators get around the omissions by running PowerShell scripts against the Exchange APIs -- or by hiring consultants to run the PowerShell scripts, which are not exactly easy or intuitive to create for mere mortals.
Enter 365 Command, a Microsoft Windows Azure Web application, available for a modest monthly fee, that presents a much more complete GUI for administration of Office 365 Exchange. Companies might use 365 Command to eliminate or reduce the need for consultants, who in turn might use it to do more work in less time with fewer errors.
In my testing, 365 Command worked well for administering my small Office 365 Exchange installation. I didn't encounter any issues that required asking for support, and I managed to make my intended changes without breaking anything for anyone. On the other hand, I more or less knew what I wanted to do.
As far as I can tell, 365 Command currently has no competition.
365 Command helps with administrative actions, reporting, and auditing. An example of an administrative action is converting a mailbox from a User type to a Shared type (see screen image). Why would you want to do that? One reason is that there is (or was) a bug in the conversion software that moves Exchange mailboxes into the Office 365 cloud that makes all mailboxes the User type. When a group uses a mailbox -- such as "sales" or "marketing" -- one good way to manage the mailbox is to make it shared. This also saves a license.
Another reason is that for common aliases, such as "sales," you may want fine-grained control over who sees what folders that you can't get from a forwarding rule in a User mailbox or from group membership.
New report focuses on interface of digital humanitarian groups and government
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
21-Oct-2013
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Contact: Aaron Lovell aaron.lovell@wilsoncenter.org 202-691-4320 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars/Science and Technology Innovation Program
Looks at best ways to take advantage of new sources of information to improve disaster response
A new report from the Wilson Center's Commons Lab, "Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response," examines a growing problem confronting government agencies: how to quickly make sense of data from the emerging technologies that are now overloading disaster responders, including social media, satellite imagery, and community-curated maps.
The report was written by John Crowley, a public policy scholar with Commons Lab, consultant at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery at The World Bank Group, and affiliated researcher with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Disaster response officials are facing a new reality as citizens increasingly use tools that interconnect over mobile networks to rapidly share information via online maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect and analyze that information, Crowley says. This information can provide critical situational awareness to the responders who provide aid.
The new report looks at how to best connect these emerging volunteer groups with government agencies, with a particular focus on the legal, policy and technological challenges.
"The key to the successful use of a collective intelligence will be generating trust in the knowledge it createsnot just inside the government, but within the populations that may be affected by future disasters," Crowley writes. "When [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] or [U.S. Agency for International Development] uses citizen-generated knowledge to make decisions around saving and sustaining life, citizens must trust that the data used to generate those decisions were the best available at the time."
He continues, "The process of deciding when to use collective intelligence to augment traditional mechanisms of sense making will mediate how this trust is built."
###
The full report can be downloaded from Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/177818033/Connecting-Grassroots-Government-for-Disaster-Response
It can also be downloaded from the Wilson Center website: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/connecting-grassroots-and-government-for-disaster-response-1
About the Commons Lab
The Commons Lab, part of the Science & Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, advances research and independent policy analysis on emerging technologies that facilitate collaborative, science-based and citizen-driven decision-making, with an emphasis on their social, legal, and ethical implications. For more information, visit: http://CommonsLab.wilsoncenter.org
About The Wilson Center
The Wilson Center provides a strictly nonpartisan space for the worlds of policymaking and scholarship to interact. By conducting relevant and timely research and promoting dialogue from all perspectives, it works to address the critical current and emerging challenges confronting the United States and the world. For more information, visit: http://www.wilsoncenter.org
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
New report focuses on interface of digital humanitarian groups and government
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
21-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Aaron Lovell aaron.lovell@wilsoncenter.org 202-691-4320 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars/Science and Technology Innovation Program
Looks at best ways to take advantage of new sources of information to improve disaster response
A new report from the Wilson Center's Commons Lab, "Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response," examines a growing problem confronting government agencies: how to quickly make sense of data from the emerging technologies that are now overloading disaster responders, including social media, satellite imagery, and community-curated maps.
The report was written by John Crowley, a public policy scholar with Commons Lab, consultant at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery at The World Bank Group, and affiliated researcher with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Disaster response officials are facing a new reality as citizens increasingly use tools that interconnect over mobile networks to rapidly share information via online maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect and analyze that information, Crowley says. This information can provide critical situational awareness to the responders who provide aid.
The new report looks at how to best connect these emerging volunteer groups with government agencies, with a particular focus on the legal, policy and technological challenges.
"The key to the successful use of a collective intelligence will be generating trust in the knowledge it createsnot just inside the government, but within the populations that may be affected by future disasters," Crowley writes. "When [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] or [U.S. Agency for International Development] uses citizen-generated knowledge to make decisions around saving and sustaining life, citizens must trust that the data used to generate those decisions were the best available at the time."
He continues, "The process of deciding when to use collective intelligence to augment traditional mechanisms of sense making will mediate how this trust is built."
###
The full report can be downloaded from Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/177818033/Connecting-Grassroots-Government-for-Disaster-Response
It can also be downloaded from the Wilson Center website: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/connecting-grassroots-and-government-for-disaster-response-1
About the Commons Lab
The Commons Lab, part of the Science & Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, advances research and independent policy analysis on emerging technologies that facilitate collaborative, science-based and citizen-driven decision-making, with an emphasis on their social, legal, and ethical implications. For more information, visit: http://CommonsLab.wilsoncenter.org
About The Wilson Center
The Wilson Center provides a strictly nonpartisan space for the worlds of policymaking and scholarship to interact. By conducting relevant and timely research and promoting dialogue from all perspectives, it works to address the critical current and emerging challenges confronting the United States and the world. For more information, visit: http://www.wilsoncenter.org
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
We begin with more revelations about the National Security Agency's spying program — this time from France.
Le Monde reported that the NSA monitored 70.3 million French phone records during a 30-day period. The article was co-authored by Glenn Greenwald. He's the American journalist who has broken many of the stories on the agency's spying programs around the world — stories made possible by the leak of documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
It's the latest revelation about the NSA's spying program that has strained relations with allies such as Brazil. But Monday's story comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the U.S., as it coincides with Secretary of State John Kerry's arrival in Paris.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, political and religious figures are condemning the attack outside a Coptic Christian church that killed four people, including two girls, ages 8 and 12.
Al-Ahram reports that a man randomly fired 15 rounds at a wedding ceremony outside the church in Cairo's Warraq neighborhood on Sunday.
Interim Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi called the attack a "cowardly criminal act." The attack was also condemned by the grand imam of the influential Al-Azhar mosque and the Salafist Nour Party.
But Al-Ahram reported that a Christian rights group blamed the government for the attack, saying it hadn't done enough to protect the community, which makes up about 10 percent of Egypt's population. Attacks against Christians have risen following the July coup that ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
Now to Zimbabwe, where the government-owned Herald reports that Western sanctions, which it calls illegal, are hurting the country's industry.
The Industrial Development Corp. has had more than $20 million frozen in the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the newspaper reported. Here's more:
"The Zimbabwe Fertiliser Company, one of the IDC subsidiaries, still has US$5 million frozen to date as the US applies its Zimbabwe Transition to Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, its sanctions law.
"The Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe also lost over US$30 million in revenue to OFAC."
The newspaper estimated that Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk by some 40 percent over the past 13 years and blamed "the West's illegal sanctions regime."
The U.S. imposed sanctions against President Robert Mugabe's government in 2003 following his crackdown on opposition groups in the country.
And, finally, to Mexico, where 7 out of 10 people say the national soccer team doesn't deserve to play in next year's World Cup in Brazil, according to a poll by El Universal newspaper.
The national team has suffered embarrassing losses and failed to qualify directly for Brazil. The team takes on New Zealand in a playoff next month.
We all know why the chicken crossed the road. Now, a new product wants to make sure they get to the other side safely. As chickens become more popular as pets, the British company Omlet is selling high-visibility chicken jackets — tiny fluorescent safety vets for when they're on the streets.
HONG KONG/PARIS (Reuters) - BNP Paribas , France's largest bank, said on Monday it planned to sell a "limited" part of its stake in South Korean lender Shinhan Financial Group Co Ltd while keeping their strategic partnership intact.
The sale comes as European banks face pressure to cut costs from tougher regulation and an uneven economic recovery.
Reuters earlier reported the French bank was offering 4.75 million shares in Shinhan for between 47,000 and 48,650 won each, according to a source with direct knowledge of the deal, effectively meaning a total price-tag of up to $218 million.
"The present financial operation is a limited adjustment," a BNP spokeswoman said. "It is part of BNP Paribas' active balance sheet management and does not reflect any strategic change in the business relationship between the two institutions."
Prior to the sale, BNP Paribas owned a 6.35 percent stake in Shinhan, equivalent to about 30.1 million shares.
BNP is in the early stages of a drive to save 2 billion euros ($2.74 billion) in annual costs by 2015, as banks across Europe look to lure investors back to the crisis-scarred sector with the promise of profitable growth despite a tough economic environment and global curbs on risk taking.
Other banks are also eyeing disposals among their Asian businesses.
BNP's main rival Societe Generale is selling its Asian private bank, people involved in the deal process have told Reuters, and Spain's BBVA has agreed the sale of a $1.3 billion stake in China's CITIC .
Overall, BNP is aiming to ramp up revenue and staff in Asia to offset economic weakness in the euro zone, where it is heavily exposed, and in July took its first step into China's insurance market by buying Dutch bank ING's stake in a partnership with Bank of Beijing .
(Reporting by Elzio Barreto in Hong Kong and Lionel Laurent in Paris; Editing by Denny Thomas, Clarence Fernandez, James Regan and David Evans)
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